A new study shows how chronic psychological stress leads to painful vessel-clogging episodes—the most common complication of sickle-cell disease (SCD) and a frequent cause of hospitalizations. The findings, made in mice, show that the gut microbiome plays a key role…
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Bacteria in the gut have a direct line to the brain
With its 100 million neurons, the gut has earned a reputation as the body’s “second brain”—corresponding with the real brain to manage things like intestinal muscle activity and enzyme secretions. A growing community of scientists are now seeking to understand…
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The Parkinson’s disease gut has an overabundance of opportunistic pathogens
Parkinson’s disease is a common, progressive and debilitating neurodegenerative disease. It currently cannot be prevented or cured. In 2003, Heiko Braak proposed that non-inherited forms of PD are caused by a pathogen in the gut. He hypothesized that the pathogen…
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Study: Mother’s gut microbiota may shape metabolism of offspring
A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions across Japan has found that in mice, a mother’s gut microbiota may shape the metabolism of her offspring in later life. In their paper published in the journal Science,…
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Trust your gut on plant-based diets for heart health
Reducing animal product intake and following a primarily plant-based diet can decrease your risk of heart disease by minimizing the adverse effects of a gut-microbiome associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease, according to research published today in the…
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Scientists link ulcerative colitis to missing gut microbes
About 1 million people in the United States have ulcerative colitis, a serious disease of the colon that has no cure and whose cause is obscure. Now, a study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators has tied the condition…
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Persistence of gut microbial strains in twins, living apart after cohabitating for decades
Your fingerprints stay the same all your life. But what about the “fingerprint” of microbial strains that are shared in the guts of childhood twins? Using a genomics strain-tracking bioinformatics tool developed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, researchers…
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